SERVICE STRUGGLE: Other military branches had to resort to new strategies to ensure an adequate number of enlistees.
— or 25% — short of its recruitment goal this year, officials confirmed Friday, despite a frantic effort to make up the widely expected gap in a year when all the military services struggled in a tight jobs market to find young people willing and fit to enlist.
According to officials, the Marine Corps, which usually goes into each fiscal year with as much as 50% of its recruiting goal already locked in, has only a bit more than 30%. And the Air Force and the Navy will only have about 10% of their goals as they start the new fiscal year. The Air Force usually has about 25%. Officials spoke on condition of anonymity to provide details on the recruiting totals that have not yet been released.
The Air Force, meanwhile, was able to pull enough recruits from its delayed entry pool to exactly met its goal to bring in 26,151 recruits this year. Early this year, military leaders were already braced for a bad recruiting season. The Army, for example, announced several months ago that it would have to adjust the expected size of its total force this year from 476,000 to about 466,000. The large recruiting shortfall was offset a bit by the Army's ability to exceed its retention goal — keeping 104% of the targeted number of troops in the service.
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